Young people in today’s world can have a great deal of stresses to navigate and overcome. Wider global issues combine with a student’s social, emotional and domestic situations to create barriers to learning or more significant issues that need to be addressed. The importance of checking in with students is enormous.
18% of children aged 7-16 years old had a probable mental disorder in 2022.
Both school and adolescence create significant stress. An estimated 33.3% of adolescents experience anxiety disorders, often fueled by school pressures like social or academic expectations. Homework, exams, bullying, friendship problems, and concerns about how others perceive them add to the challenges students face.
Stresses and mental health problems are widespread in schools, but many students may be facing sources of anxiety outside of school hours for example, in their home lives.
1 in 5 children have lived with an adult perpetrating domestic abuse. For many, school is a safe place to be and perhaps preferable to being at home. Those who feel unsafe or unhappy in their lives outside of school need to be identified and supported.
The importance of checking in with students is massive. Regardless of the scale of a student’s issue, having an opportunity to disclose negative feelings and be given the appropriate guidance has a transformative impact on a child. There are improvements to:
- Academic performance
- Attendance
- Building relationships
- Emotional regulation
- Engagement
- Establishing goals
- Safety
- Support progress
Welfare benefits
It has never been so important to check in with students for the sake of their academic and, most importantly, their general welfare. These interactions with a student are vital.
How ECINS Can Help
ECINS has designed its systems with the importance of checking in with students in mind. By providing wraparound support, ECINS offers students an outlet to check in with trusted staff members by reporting their current situation.
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Moreover, ECINS streamlines the process of checking in with students, making it more efficient for staff members. The platform allows school staff to reach out easily and improve data capture; staff conduct more productive check-ins and follow clear follow-up procedures. By reducing administrative strain, ECINS benefits everyone.
Universal Screener
This screening function enables staff to send assessments to individuals, distribution groups, cohorts, or personalized sets of students. Staff use pre-loaded forms or create them from scratch to maximize the usefulness of responses. They convert responses into scores and generate reports; the data allows staff to create specific reports, such as analyzing all answers to question five.
ECINS’ universal screener could collect data from the beginning, middle and end of the year – for example – and run a report to see how grades improved and identify areas that need work. Whilst these reports are used for entire cohorts, they also identify which students may need additional support. The universal screening feature makes the important exercise of checking in with students as simple as possible.
Wheel Assessments
Staff visualize data collected from universal screening forms using the wheel assessment feature. Wheel assessments compare data points visually, helping staff draw insights. They use this tool to check in with students—for example, a wheel assessment could highlight a particular student’s decline in academic achievement, social life, and emotional status compared to last term.
Wheel assessments visually represent areas where individuals and cohorts struggle. This comparative feature enables staff to identify where further intervention is needed to support everyone effectively.
Student Engagement Module
The SEM is located in MyPortal360, a secure platform that is accessed via web browse or app. ECINS’ Student Engagement Module has a variety of tools to provide wraparound support for students:
- Task-setter
- Mood tracker
- Attendance tracker
- Calendar
- Help + advice documents
- Chat function
Staff members use the task-setting feature to encourage young people to complete forms sent through the universal screening feature. Students can see the status of these tasks, such as whether they are overdue, which promotes timely check-ins.
Moreover, the ECINS mood tracker encourages students to document their feelings and fill-out a short entry about their welfare. This method of checking in is confidential (only trusted staff members view the responses) and gives young people the confidence to disclose their situations and seek help.
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